I've recently heard about this YouTube account named Roel Van De Paar. If you've looked up any error message on YouTube recently, you've probably run into him. Because of the "no dislikes" change, he's everywhere now.
And by everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE. The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account, and if you check now they've probably uploaded a few videos in the past couple minutes. The videos are generated crap, ripped from tech forums. Normally you wouldn't see it anywhere due to dislikes being easy to spot, but now they pop up all the time in search results due to dislikes becoming a sort of "hidden feature".
Hiding dislikes = less people press dislike (no feedback) = low quality videos are much harder to get rid of in search results. It's really, really bad.
I think GP's point isn't that he's violating SE's license, but that he has almost two million videos with new ones uploaded about every three minutes. And his videos are constantly recommended to GP.
It was strange, because it was titled like “how to play this music”, except clearly it was just a MIDI file piped through a visualisation into the video; as a musician I know it’s useless for the task at hand.
Presumably the author has automated this by scraping tons of free MIDI files, rendering them to video, prepending a generic video intro, and hoping to cash in.
For me at least the main problem isn't so much this person/channel, you can always tell YouTube to stop suggesting a channel. It's the people that now realise this is something YouTube allows (or at least doesn't seem to care about).
Relating to reply girls, I really loved YouTube's video response feature. It's understandable why it went away, but it was still really cool to be able to find responses to videos. Now if I watch a video arguing for X and want to see a response I have to search "Response to X" or "X rebutted" etc.
"Although many users would click the "dislike" button on the videos, this was interpreted by YouTube's algorithm as legitimate engagement, and the videos would be ranked more highly."
I don't care for what he's doing or his business, but youtube is to blame for recommending him. Also, I just click don't recommend and it works every time my kid takes over the machine to binge watch the entire minecraft community.
You've probably ruined my recommendations forever now. :(
I pretty much only stick to subscriber channels now except for stuff people send me. Since there's no dislikes I just don't browse the stuff available anymore.
YouTube is definitely worse off without the dislike counter.
I have done it a lot for around a year, but i think than the block list is very limited, because after a will the same "blocked" channels come back again in the list. I have now stopped to use this fake feature. I am sure of it because i regularly block official news or music channels, but they appear again anyway after a wile.
It's the same for the "not interested" feature. I have stop to tell them, when asked, why i am not interested (mainly because i have already see the video). The same already "not interested" videos, already viewed and already liked videos show up again after a wile anyway...
"I would love to see someone look deep into Twitch recommendation system - last time I tested the thing they call "Feedback" is a rolling buffer and wont let you exclude more than ~100 things, adding more simply removed oldest entries and starts spamming you with things you already excluded in the past. This looked like performance optimization (less things to track per user)."
I'm baffled by people who says things like this. I make heavy use of both "Not Interested" and "Don't recommend Channel". They don't do as much as I would like (why oh why does Youtube insist on thinking I'm interested in obscure Rap/Hip Hop?), but I can clearly see recommendations shift over time. Marking any single video doesn't seem to do much, but marking 5-10 similar videos (mostly) does something.
Paid promotion (by channels) breaks past the barriers... It's part of the conflict of maintaining the illusion that sponsored content is what gets first placement throughout YouTube.
Its also maddening to content creators how newly upload content lists only feature paid promotional content every time. That's also exactly what makes certain (paid) content look massively popular over everything else, even when the production values are sub-par.
Everyone on platforms now has a different experience because of configuration and account maturity. Invalidating another user's experience because of yours is not helpful to meaningful discussion. I did not downvote you though.
A much better approach is to go to your history and delete it from your history (if you're signed in) this will change your recommendations so much harder.
I've blocked entire accounts, because it kept coming back every time i searched for something specific. It was one of these "10 best <xyz>" channels. Really annoying.
Top 10 videos are so often just complete crap. Every once in a while you will get a decent production, and even rarer you get one of those that isn't also an ad for something (looking at you, MrWhoseTheBoss). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz_xJPN7lAY comes to mind as one of the "good ones". But the format is just so perfect for what YouTube as a platform rewards.
uBlock breaks that menu though, so it's a hassle to turn it off, block it and then turn it back on. Especially since you have to refresh and youtube randomizes the recommendations again and sometimes hides all traces of that channel.
Youtube has a history tab, my advice is to go through it and remove videos that you don't want recommended.
I learned this the hard way after watching a few videos about a particular person who had a fatal disease and then overnight my Youtube recommendations all turned into videos about cancer.
> The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account, and if you check now they've probably uploaded a few videos in the past couple minutes.
I thought that this must be an exaggeration but I just looked at the account and at this time the account has 20 videos posted in the last hour.
I know Youtube/Google has a ton of resources -- but won't accounts with garbage/spammy content like this cause long-term issues in regard to wasting resources? Surely, Youtube would protect itself against something like this in its ToS, right?
> Hiding dislikes = less people press dislike (no feedback)
Wow, I just realized that I haven't pressed the dislike button since the count was removed. I didn't do it intentionally, but I literally just deleted, in my mind, the fact that there was a dislike button.
I saw similar bots who copy-paste news content into videos. It's funny to a certain degree. Imagine you are the person doing this, trying to figure out for months how to make money online. In the end, you come to the conclusion that you have to spam YouTube and upload as much as possible - in an automated way... =)
A more elaborate scam are those graphic card reviews: They claim for example to test 4 different GPUs and show them in split screen with FPS and memory information. In reality, it's probably just 1 GPU with the displayed information being faked, because from the pictures alone, you can't see a difference. The information one has to display for the different GPUs can be easily acquired from legitimate graphic card reviews. These videos get millions of views, with positive ratings. Some of these channels probably make >10k a month.
Is this guy making income from doing this? I may have to re-evaluate my career if I can pay my rent by mostly just dumping random internet content into a video.
TikTok and instagram are filled with get rich quick schemes that say to do exactly this. Go here for stock video and go here for AI video editing and you’ll have passive income. Look how much I made last month! Look how when you search for calm music I am the top 20 results!
This guy maybe not yet, but producing garbage content en-masse for social media is definitely a profitable niche. Popular "DIY" and lifehacks pages/channels are making decent bucks especially considering they are often based in third-world countries.
The 5 Minute Crafts channel and some other associated channels are infamous for this. A lot of them start out OK and once they have some numbers just shift to pumping out algorithm fodder.
Some are associated with large content factories that operate similar to Troll Farms.
yes and approximately $2000-6000 a month. those numbers could fluctuate a great deal either way. there's no set "pay scale" and nobody really knows how it works.
> If you've looked up any error message on YouTube recently
This tidbit is the biggest news on the page for me. I had no idea people used YouTube this way. It sounds excruciating, though don’t knock it till you’ve tried it I suppose.
I can't find any reputable source or even credible estimate about the total number of videos on YouTube.
What I did find, though, is that YouTube currently touts[1] "500+ hours of content uploaded every minute", which means 43.2 million minutes of video per day if we take that claim at face value.
And a study finding the average video length was 11.7 minutes[2] in 2018.
So, naively doing the math suggests that YouTube is currently adding ~3.7 million videos per day. Or another billion videos every 9 months.
Keep in mind this doesn't account for a ton of variables and the math is pretty hand wavy. But it's the closest thing I could do to a sanity check on the numbers in 5 minutes.
Conclusion: yeah there's way more than a billion videos on YouTube.
Fair enough - I literally just googled "how many videos on youtube" and stuck with the first result. Not very scientific but I also don't really care that much
What feedback mechanism would you use to filter the crap? There is no longer an incentive for users to down-vote (assuming you managed to even get that data). And such a search engine needs a literal army of users providing signal to evaluate the quality of content as it is released.
Backlinks linking to the video on the web, number of views, likes, comments, NLP analysis of the title and the description of the video and yea references made to each video in other video descriptions is also good idea.
It's an interesting idea. But my gut feel is that only a minority of content actually is referenced elsewhere. It would be an interesting idea to test though!
> There is no longer an incentive for users to down-vote
I don't get that. It should have the exact same incentive to down-vote, unless you think Google no longer collects or uses that information as opposed to just hiding it.
People respond to feedback mechanisms. If you hid comments on videos, do you think people would be as inclined to add their own comments as much when it is literally going into the void?
Previously, disliking would increment the global "dislike" counter and users got immediate visual feedback that their dislike was counted, even if that state may take minutes for Google to reconcile and store.
Now, clicking the dislike doesn't do much and users have no indication whether others disliked the content too.
YouTube is not a natural monopoly, as evidenced by the fact that there are other video hosting services (e.g. Vimeo, Facebook, PeerTube). The network effect is real, to be sure, but it isn't absolute, and anyone can start a competing service which is immediately accessible to every Internet user(†). It's not cheap or easy, of course, especially at YouTube's scale, but YouTube has to overcome the same issues. That's just called being good at what they do.
†) Other than those blocked by the Great Firewall of China, of course—or other national firewalls—but then are they really Internet users when large portions of the Internet are inaccessible to them due to government censorship?
> YouTube is not a natural monopoly, as evidenced by the fact that there are other video hosting services (e.g. Vimeo, Facebook, PeerTube).
Tesla sells solar roofs and power walls accessible to every person in US. Is it an evidence electrical grid is not a natural monopoly? No it is not.
Wikipedia defines natural monopoly as following:
> an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors
The network effect does give Google that overwhelming advantage over potential competitors.
Let’s not forget Google themselves tried to create such a competitor in 2005, the service was called “Google Video”. They tried to compete for a year or so, failed despite they had way more money, then bought the complete YouTube.
I'll add, though, that the part of Google / YouTube / Alphabet that people continually forget in these discussions is the monopoly of the advertising space.
Infrastrucutre, contracts, metrics, standards, etc., all benefit Google (and Facebook) strongly. Together they claim over half of all online advertising.
> Tesla sells solar roofs and power walls accessible to every person in US. Is it an evidence electrical grid is not a natural monopoly? No it is not.
Unlike competing video hosting platforms, solar roofs and PowerWalls are not the same product as the electrical grid. There is some substitution effect, but they generally work in tandem. Most solar and PowerWall-equipped homes are not fully off-grid; it can be done but it takes a lot of storage to ensure you never run out of power with normal household use. (My 5.12 kWh of solar panels generally result in a net surplus of energy each month, but even so I've calculated based on daily net consumption over the last ~16 months that 100 kWh of storage—7-8 PowerWall 2s–would still leave the system depleted by the end of the day 13% of the time. Granted, that includes a three-week span last February where the panels weren't generating much of anything due to snow cover, but that wasn't the only occasion where it would have run out.)
The "natural monopoly" of the electrical grid, for those who believe in such things, lies in access to the physical right-of-way for laying cables to everyone's houses. I'm not sure I'd call this a natural monopoly as the difficulty newcomers face in accessing the right of way (or depending on how you look at it, the ease with which the incumbents claimed the right-of-way for themselves, often through eminent domain) is mostly artificial. Regardless, while it is a true barrier to entry favoring incumbents over the competition, nothing of this nature applies to either Tesla's solar + storage business or to YouTube.
> The network effect does give Google that overwhelming advantage over potential competitors.
The network effect is certainly an advantage while it lasts, but networks are highly mutable, to the point that I wouldn't call this a barrier to entry. For example MySpace had major network effects once as the dominant social network—right up until it was completely replaced by Facebook. Crowds can be fickle like that. There isn't even a social network effect for YouTube like there is with Facebook, where you're strongly incentivized to stick with the same system your friends are using. If you upload your videos somewhere else—as many people do—everyone will still be able to see them.
Of course that doesn't guarantee that any particular experiment in competition will succeed. As you say, Google Video failed to gain traction, and it was hardly the only one. But even so, YouTube has competitors. The failure of Google Video does not imply that YouTube's position in the market is inviolable. They retain their place only so long as they continue to provide the best service.
As you correctly pointed out, the natural monopoly of electrical grid is the network of the cables which connect large pool of producers to even larger pool of consumers. There’re many ways to generate electricity, but if one wants reliable power for reasonable price, the best way by far is connecting to the grid.
Similarly, the natural monopoly of youtube is the social network of people, which connects content creators and viewers. Now in 2022 it’s relatively easy to host videos even at scale, but if a content creator wants access to the global audience, or a viewer wants to watch videos, the best way by far is YouTube.
> networks are highly mutable
Facebook did not win as a result of services competing for users. Few people actually switched from myspace to Facebook. The way Facebook won, it managed to grow faster.
Facebook has 3B monthly active users. We have 8B people living on the planet, 5B of them are already using internet. In 2009 when Facebook overtook Myspace, only 1.8B people were using the internet. Facebook and youtube simply managed to capture the majority of these new 3.2B internet users, and that growth is what made these social networks so mutable in the past. This won’t happen again, not enough people on the planet.
>If you upload your videos somewhere else—as many people do—everyone will still be able to see them.
But people would not be able to find those videos that are uploaded to the competing service/s because Google controls 90% of the internet search and on top of that YouTube is the second most popular search engine on the web after Google itself.
i learned about him a few days ago. it's logical to me that "Roel Van de Paar" is not the name of a real person and the person shown in the clip on each video (granted, i only watched two, but i think it's the same for every single one) is either deep faked or just a random that got paid $21.50 to read a script on camera.
then i found this https://github.com/roelvdp in my searching and it kind of made things a little bit more interesting. i didn't look at a side-by-side of the man in the video and the man in the photo here, but from memory they looked like they could be similar enough to be the same person with somewhat of an age gap between time's taken. they also look different enough to be different people. that's not what's weird, though. most of his contributions are for private repos and a lot of his "repositories" are forks from projects involved with machine/deep learning, AI, databases, and all sorts of stuff that someone smarter than me would know what it does or is used for, but they go back 2014ish.
i didn't spend more than a few minutes "investigating" and sure didn't touch any of his videos with my own IP/logged in user, because my YT recommendations are screwed up enough. either way, i think the github account is probably whoever is behind this, well, pretty amazing feat, at this point. i hate it, but you just can't deny that it's actually going on and has been for a LONG time. that's respectable in a sense. i did the math for a 10 hour period in which i counted roughly 240 new videos and it equated to an upload every 2 minutes. impressive, right? well, if this were true that would mean only 262800 videos a year and he has uploaded 1 million since ~March 2021, based on some search results i found where "people" were celebrating his 1M mark. heh.
YT would probably help this issue quite a bit by requiring thumbnails to be actual captures from the video content rather than up-loadable clickbait images... For years now their uploader only picks the 3 worst possible shots from content to be used, and channels create bright thumbnails that often don't reflect the actual content at all.
You get more views on any video by adding totally non-relevant thumbnails with colorful graphics and cleavage in them, and it's totally stupid when it comes to important topics that the absolute worst content ranks first because of what thumbnail it has.
I am exhausted with complaining about this issue, search results on YT have been totally maligned with finding the best content that I search reddit and Twitter now for useful YT content primarily.
Also, the filter options are a total joke, and spammy titles are now rampant on the platform for everything.
MGMT should really feel ashamed for the lack of meaningful scaling over the years on the YT platform.
I misread your comment, thinking "2 million views" is not that much, how can it be 0.2% of the entire platform? Then I realized you said "videos" not "views"... That's insane.
And by everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE. The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account, and if you check now they've probably uploaded a few videos in the past couple minutes. The videos are generated crap, ripped from tech forums. Normally you wouldn't see it anywhere due to dislikes being easy to spot, but now they pop up all the time in search results due to dislikes becoming a sort of "hidden feature".
Hiding dislikes = less people press dislike (no feedback) = low quality videos are much harder to get rid of in search results. It's really, really bad.